What About the "Unimpeachable" Offenses?

As journalist Judith Coburn noted, "The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12."

Gerald Ford's "only honest answer" -- acknowledging that an impeachable offense is only "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history" -- foreshadowed the impeachment proceedings against Nixon, Clinton and Trump.

If what's impeachable is only what members of Congress say it is, constituents should insist that egregiously narrow definitions must no longer prevail. Otherwise, the operative standard for presidents will continue to be what they can get away with -- in tandem with a collectively feckless Congress.

For now, the presidential offenses that are routinely considered unimpeachable -- and therefore ultimately acceptable -- tell us a lot about Congress. And about U.S. mass media. And maybe about ourselves.

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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

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